Khan al-Hinta, Latakia’s Old Wheat Inn

An Ottoman khan, a merchants’ inn built around a courtyard, in Latakia’s old market district, where wheat from the countryside was stored and sold on through the port. It is one of the few khans still standing in the city. The name says what it did: Khan al-Hinta means the Wheat Khan. The interior is not set up for visitors; today it is a working metal depot. Even so, its south front, with its Roman granite columns, can be read from the street.

Getting there

The khan is in the Uwayna quarter, with Ghafiqi Street to the south and Omar ibn al-Khattab Street to the west. To the east, across Balat al-Shuhada lane, stands the Al-Jadid Mosque; Ugarit Square lies to the west and Ghafiqi Garden to the east. From the Al-Jadid Mosque, walk one lane west and you are in front of the khan.

Why it has two names

The name Khan al-Hinta comes from wheat. The Latakia countryside grew wheat for export, which is why the khan sits in the middle of the market, close to the port. A document from 1907 calls it the New Khan instead, because it stood next to the Al-Jadid, or New, Mosque and to the nearby new coffee house.

What to see

The khan first appears in an Ottoman document dated 1726 and is mentioned again in documents from 1870 and 1907. Its owners then were Omar Agha, known as Ibn al-Duwayr, and the sons of Qablan Pasha. The building is sandstone and covers about 1300 square metres. In the middle is an open-air courtyard of nearly 400 square metres, surrounded by vaulted rooms, iwans (vaulted halls open on one side), arcades, a well and stone stairs to the upper floor. Some of the upper rooms have wooden ceilings.

The south front is about 60 metres long and two storeys high. On the ground floor, five pointed arches rest on granite columns. In all, 13 granite columns, each more than five metres tall, stand half-buried along the front. They were not brought here later: they belonged to the colonnade that lined the main east-west street of Roman Laodicea, and they are still in their original positions.

How it reached today

Latakia grew at the end of the 17th century and the start of the 18th century as a stop on the coastal pilgrimage route, and khans multiplied then. When the city was replanned on Western lines under the French Mandate, the khans began to decline. The upper floor of Khan al-Hinta became a hotel and part of it an office and a coffee house; the rooms facing the street were turned into shops with their own doors. The colonnaded Roman street became a market, then a vegetable and poultry market. Ghafiqi Street to the south, formerly Souq al-Awamid, was widened in 1958. The northern rooms upstairs served as a hotel until the 1980s. The building was registered as a historic monument in 1999. Today it is in the hands of shopkeepers and a metal trading depot.

How long it takes

Fifteen minutes. Walking the south front along Ghafiqi Street and counting the columns is enough. To look into the courtyard, ask the people working in the depot.

What most people miss

The granite columns between the shops. People walking past the shop windows usually take them for part of the building. In fact they mark the line of a Roman street from two thousand years ago: the row of columns follows the old street, now buried under today’s road.